The Tudor conquest (or reconquest) of Ireland took place under the Tudor dynasty, which held the Kingdom of England during the 16th century. Following a failed rebellion against the crown by Silken Thomas, the Earl of Kildare, in the 1530s, Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland in 1542 by statute of the Parliament of Ireland, with the aim of restoring such central authority as had been lost throughout the country during the previous two centuries. Several people who helped establish the Plantations of Ireland also played a part later in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the West Country men.[1]
Ireland in 1500 was shaped by the Norman conquest, initiated by Cambro-Norman barons in the 12th century. Many of the native Gaelic Irish had been expelled from various parts of the country (mainly the east and southeast) and replaced with English peasants and labourers. A large area on the east coast, extending from the Wicklow Mountains in the south to Dundalk in the north (covering parts of modern counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath, Westmeath, Kildare, Offaly, and Laois), became known as the Pale. Protected along much of its length by a ditch and rampart, the Pale was a defended area in which English language and culture predominated and where English law was enforced by a government in Dublin.
Colonial Conquest For Mac
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After a neutral period from 1558 to 1570, Pope Pius V declared Elizabeth a heretic in his 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. This complicated the conquest further, as her authority to rule was denied and her officials were considered by observant Roman Catholics to be acting unlawfully. Most Irish people of all ranks remained Catholic and the bull gave Protestant administrators a new reason to expedite the conquest. The Second Desmond Rebellion, from 1579 to 1583, was assisted by hundreds of papal troops. Religion had become a new marker of loyalty to the administration.
The crisis point of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland came when the English authorities tried to extend their authority over Ulster and Aodh Mór Ó Néill, the most powerful Irish lord in Ireland. Though initially appearing to support the crown, Ó Néill engaged in a proxy war in Fermanagh and northern Connacht, by sending troops to aid Aodh Mag Uidhir lord of Fermanagh. This distracted the crown with military campaigns in the west while Tyrone consolidated his power in Ulster. Ó Néill openly broke with the crown in February 1595 when his forces took and destroyed the Blackwater Fort on the Armagh-Tyrone border. Later named the Nine Years War, Ó Néill focused his action in Ulster and along its borders, until Spanish promises of aid in 1596 led him to spread the conflict to the rest of Ireland. What had started as a war for regional autonomy became a war for the control of Ireland. With the Irish victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, the collapse of the Munster Plantation, followed by the dismal vice-royalty of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the power of the Crown in Ireland came close to collapse.
The first and most important result of the conquest was the disarmament of the native Irish lordships and the establishment of central government control for the first time over the whole island; Irish culture, law, and language were replaced; and many Irish lords lost their lands and hereditary authority. Thousands of English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers were introduced into the country and the administration of justice was enforced according to English common law and statutes of the Parliament of Ireland.
Under James I, Catholics were barred from all public office after the gunpowder plot was discovered in 1605; the Gaelic Irish and Old English increasingly defined themselves as Catholic in opposition to the Protestant New English. However the native Irish (both Gaelic and Old English) remained the majority landowners in the country until after the Irish Rebellion of 1641. By the end of the resulting Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the 1650s, the "New English" Protestants dominated the country, and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 their descendants went on to form the Protestant Ascendancy.
The problem was that Strongbow was an errant vassal, out of royal favor after having taken the wrong side in the civil war that preceded Henry's accession. The latter had denied him the title of earl for his Welsh estates, and was hardly likely to allow him become king of Leinster, which Strongbow was intending to do following Mac Murchada's death in May 1171. Attempts having failed to forbid Strongbow's departure for Ireland, to call home his associates, and to blockade their supplies, Henry decided to come to Ireland, to regularize the position of Strongbow and the other adventurers who were making rapid strides there, and to oversee the conquest in person. And so, when he landed near Waterford on 17 October 1171, with five hundred knights and four thousand archers, Henry II became the first English king to enter Ireland.
However, Henry did not meet the high king, Ruaidrí Ó Conchobair (Rory O'Connor), and the Anglo-Norman settlement did not proceed easily when faced with his opposition, although his armies proved ineffective against the sophistication of the Norman military machine and the invulnerability to Irish assault of the castles with which they were busy dotting the landscape. A compromise was required, and in 1175 the "treaty" of Windsor was negotiated whereby Ruaidrí accepted the Anglo-Norman colony, which was confined within its existing boundaries (Leinster, Munster from Waterford to Dungarvan, and Meath, which Henry had given to Hugh de Lacy in 1172), while Henry acknowledged Ruaidrí as the paramount power elsewhere. However, this had little appeal for the land-hungry colonists and was soon abandoned in favor of a policy of all-out conquest, with speculative grants of Desmond and Thomond being made to favorites of the king, while John de Courcy won east Ulster for himself in 1177. In that year, a royal council was held at Oxford at which the youngest of Henry's four sons, John, was made lord of Ireland. He was not expected to succeed to the throne, and so Henry envisaged a loose constitutional arrangement whereby Ireland would be ruled by a junior branch of the English royal family.
It was 1185 before John visited Ireland, but his youthful folly in his dealings with the Irish kings alienated them from their new lord, who was busy building castles on Leinster's frontier and granting lands in Munster to the ancestors of the Butlers and Burkes, while what is now County Louth was also taken from the Irish. In terms of fostering relations with the Irish, John's expedition proved disastrous, but it did advance the conquest and saw the establishment in Ireland of a form of government modeled on that of England, a pattern that has prevailed. John's later expedition in 1210 was hardly more productive since he was again inept in his treatment of the native rulers, although he reasserted his faltering authority over the colonists and further expanded the apparatus and reach of royal government. In the meantime, in 1199, John had ascended the throne, and hence the lordship of Ireland and kingship of England were, by an accident of history, reunited in the same person, as remained the case long thereafter.
By the time of John's second visit the country had been immeasurably transformed. The power of the Irish kings, except in the northwestern quadrant of the island, had been minimized, and their best ancestral lands taken from them by Anglo-Norman barons intent on expanding even further. They were able to do so by virtue of their advanced military equipment and tactics and their policy of encastellation. Beginning with rapidly erected timber structures atop earthen mounds (the motte-and-bailey), they were soon constructing massive stone fortresses like Trim and Carrickfergus, a sign for all to see that they were there to stay. But these would have meant nothing to the Irish if conquest werenot followed by large-scale colonization. Only then, by the banishment of the native population from the fertile plains or their reduction to servile status, and the introduction of a new, loyal English population, could the colony feel secure and, just as important, provide a profit for those adventurers who had risked all on crossing the Irish Sea to start a new life.
In the aftermath of the invasion, therefore, Ireland witnessed nothing short of an economic and agricultural revolution. The great lords parceled up their conquests among members of the lesser gentry from their homelands who were prepared to join them on this new frontier. The latter in turn persuaded others to follow suit (probably not too difficult at a time of population growth), and as each took ownership of their new estates, they enticed over their English and Welsh tenants, offering more attractive terms of tenure. They built new towns and boroughs and persuaded burgesses to inhabit them by less rigorous taxes and regulation. Just as towns needed merchants, traders, and craftsmen, so too manors needed laborers and parishes needed priests. Everything required to turn this new colony into a facsimile of England was found and shipped over from the neighboring isle, and within a generation or two the transformation was immense. But it was never complete. In the north and west, and in the uplands and bogs, the native Irish remained intact. Denied access to the law and treated as enemies in their own land, they remained a potential threat, and although the colony continued to expand until about the year 1300, its unfinished nature meant that an Irish resurgence was inevitable.
According to Mac Ionnrachtaigh, Connolly drew inspirationfrom the past and argued for a united ideological front that would enable thereconquest of Ireland in the future based on what he viewed as the culture,fellowship and co-operative ideals of Gaelic civilisation. 2ff7e9595c
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